EMTEL-Homepage
Prepared by
Roger Silverstone and Maren Hartmann
on behalf of the Network
This paper provides a summary account of the discussion that took place at the EMTEL Meeting at Sussex between 13th-14th May 1995. It also provides a framework for further discussions and for wider debate.
EMTEL is a network which has been established by the EU under its Human Capital and Mobility Programme. Members of the network are concerned with the changing place and significance of information and communication technologies and services in everyday life, and the implications of the technical changes associated with the 'information revolution' for social and cultural life across Europe.
EMTEL's initial and primary focus is on the user/producer interface, on the relationship between consumption and production, and on the the implications of this focus for an understanding of the innovation of information and communication technolgies (ICTs). We problematise most aspects of this relationship, especially from the point of view of considering it as a social, cultural and communicative process as well as an economic one. Central to our concerns is the role of user in present and future technological innovation.
Process is therefore a key term in the discussion, implying a continuous and complex movement of objects and meanings both in the life of information and communication technologies and within the context of our everyday lives.
Seeing innovation as a process, and the relationship between users and producers as dynamic, involves the need to understand the various kinds of activity that are involved. Both new and old technologies are shaped, not only in the activities of design and marketing, but also in the work of consumption. This work is, potentially, endless. It involves adoption, adaptation, substitution and rejection as consumers define their own relationships to the technologies and services that appear on the market and enter their own private spaces. Technologies and services therefore have careers which extend long after the point of initial purchase.
The innovation process is also a political one. It involves both a macro-politics of regulation and global economics, which is both international and national, regional and local, and a micro-politics of meaning, a politics which is gendered, domestic, and conducted in, and has consequences for, the relationships between public and private spaces and lives. It involves and sustains a consumerist society which in turn has significant consequences for the political process.
More precisely this framework involves discussion of a number of key terms, concepts and orientations which will of course require further elaboration. We are concerned with:
- how information and communication technologies are positioned in social and cultural space and how their social and cultural significance is affected by technological, economic and social factors
- the definition of a conceptual and methodological approach to the relations between production and consumption
- the specifically European dimensions of the innovation of information and communication technologies and services.
The papers summarised in Appendix 1 have initiated a discussion which can be summarised under the following headings:
2. Power and politics
3. Meaning and meanings
4. Methodology and reflexivity.
In drawing on social constructivist literature in technology, as well as on a wider range of social and historical approaches to technological emergence, we need to be clear about what if anything we can say about information and communication technologies and services that make their distinctiveness apparent. The following are therefore relevant:
- their salience in public discourse, as the site of such ideologically loaded notions as: the 'information society' or the 'information revolution', and the constant assumption that it is the technology that does things - and that we - society, nation, individuals - are being left behind
- the obverse point, that information and communication technologies actually do provide a kind of 'virtual social structure'
- some talk of 'virtual communities' as well as global villages or global houses. Such characterisation depends on a recognition of information and communication technologies' pervasiveness and ubiquity, and on the increasing dependence of organisations and individuals on their huge capacity to generate and transmit information and communication
- acknowledging these opposing generalities we still need to identify information and communication technologies in their specificity, as complex technologies exhibiting kinds of differences at every stage of their emergence and use. ICTs are flexible (though how flexible, and according to what constraints is very much the issue) in design and use. They are both primary technologies (in that they are themselves the visible product of the innovation process) and they are secondary technologies (in that they enable the functioning of an otherwise differently oriented technology)
- ICTs are plausibly specific too in their double articulation (as meaningful objects and media). We try and understand their social life and significance both as objects - as machines symbolically and materially present and significant in everyday life We also try and understand their significance as media and in their capacity to mediate public and private culture. In the latter manifestation we are confronted much less with the technology than with information and communication as our object of study
- ICTs are rhetorically distinct, offering in their various kinds of textualities information, knowledge and pleasures - meanings of all kinds - which are neither determined by economic or political structures nor determining of how they will be consumed or used
- ICTs are, in some senses invisible. They have meaning only in use,
as extensions of human senses and sensibilities, and as environments for
action.
2. Power and politics
Politics is an issue at a number of different levels, in relation to:
- consumers, users and the State (over regulatory and competition policies, for example). There are wider issues here of citizenship and the implications of the market's erosion of principles of universal access or public service in both broadcasting culture and telephony, as well as the role of the State in consumer protection
- consumers and producers (over the initial and final meaning of an innovation, both hardware and software - and in the tensions between design and domestication). The absence (or inadequacy) of producer knowledge is increasingly being noted by researchers, as is the influence of advertising and the role of the media as secondary discourses offering constant commentary and evaluation of technological innovation
- consumers and other consumers (both in the general emulative principles of consumption originally discussed by Veblen, and in the micro-politics of the household and everyday life). Here the different dimensions of the complex sociology and anthropology of information and communication technologies come to the foreground, with concerns about gender, age, class, life-style, region having to be taken into account in both analysing the political battle-lines and the relative power of the participants.
Underlying and overlaying these three dimensions of the politics of
information and communication technologies are more general concerns both
with ideology and empowerment: both with the possibilities and the impossibilities
of alternative routes through the 'information society' and the realities
or fantasies of consumers and users, either individually or in organised
groups (such as Consumer Organisations), and their capacity to gain a measure
of control of their lives with technology.
3. Meaning and meanings
This is a related and fundamental issue, because meaning is the source of action and because the meanings that emerge around new, as well as old, technologies are the result of a politics of definition. They are therefore always contested and always unstable.
We can ask the following questions:
The meanings attached to ICTs are generated in a number of different ways:
To argue for the salience of meaning in an analysis of the relationship between production and consumption in ICT innovation is to acknowledge the crucial role of interpretative flexibility that we grant to those involved at all stages of the innovation process. How a given set of meanings (and definitions) emerges, and how those sets of meanings come or do not come to predominate, is a key empirical and theoretical question, requiring careful attention to the various socio-technical practices that together define and construct such meanings and the practices that depend upon them.
A focus on meaning also requires us to rethink the notion of 'need'
and to see this as also socially produced.
4. Methodology and reflexivity
Our overall task in EMTEL is to make progress on this underpinning issue: to confront the methodological implications of the discussions so far (and others still to come) for approaching the European dimensions of information and communication technologies and services in everyday life.
We start with fundamental questions of reflexivity and epistemology. We as researchers are part of the society we research and as such we are players in the politics of the innovation process (see 2 above).
What implications does this have for our methodological approach and for the kinds of judgements that we make and are being asked to make about the relationship between information and communication technologies and society? This question is of course not just an epistemological but it is also a political one. It relates to, and depends on, our position vis à vis industry and government.
Over the next two years, as we discuss specific aspects of our work, we need constantly to attend to these questions as well as to the more practical issues of developing a set of tools which will enable an operationalisation of our approaches in a European context.
We need to address the following questions:
Appendix 1
Summaries of Papers Presented at the EMTEL Meeting of 13-14 May 1995
Gender, Technology and Everyday Life - A Seamless Web or Worlds Apart
Anne-Jorunn Berg
Centre for Technology and Society, University of Trondheim
Gender can be seen as central in understanding the dynamics of meaning of technology in everyday life. Both the meaning of technology and the meaning of gender are subject to negotiation and shifts in their mutual construction in the spaces, times and activities of everyday life - both within the home and outside it. The 'larger web of experience' is a necessary precondition, methodologically, for an understanding of the dynamics of gender and technology, not just from the point of view of establishing differences between male and female but from the point of view of establishing differences within male and female uses of technology (and logically too any lack of differences, especially between male and female uses). The need above all not to accept established stereotypes of use and non-use. This is an important example of the necessity to tease out the relations of determination (technological determinism) and indetermination in the uses and meanings of technology.
Media Use on the Information Highway: Towards a New Consumer Market or Towards Increased Competition to Win Round the Consumer
Yves Punie
Studies on Media, Information and Communication, Free University of Brussels
The constraints on innovation depend not just on the relative inelasticity of disposable income (and the relative shares accorded to different categories of household expenditure) but on equivalent if not identical inelasticities in time and space. For example the number of hours watched on television has not increased with increases in the number of channels, and the relative amount of leisure time spent at home or outside the home has remained more or less constant across Europe (60-40). It is of course perfectly possible to argue that tiny shifts (of a mere percentage one way or the other) will have huge implications for the market and for the innovation process as a whole. There is a powerful interdependency between the supply of new technology, government involvement in the support of new technologies (Minitel and Internet) and the release of huge alternative 'consumer' definitions of uses and meanings. While recognising the active and dynamic nature of the innovation process one still needs to identify the possible kinds of activities that may have major consequences on future use - i.e. displacement as well as enhancement or addition with respect to new technologies.
Position Paper on User-Producer Relations
Thea Weijers
TNO Centre for Technology and Policy Studies, Appeldoorn, and
Mike Gibbons
SPRU, Sussex
What counts as new ? The answer depends on an understanding of the centrality of the intermediate space between user and producer and its status as a product of the vertical division of labour and of a complex of market forces and information. This is turn requires recognition of a hierarchy of complexity. Key issues centre on the problem of learning from the consumer and the nature of an organised market. There is a need crucially to theorise design as an economic (but also as a social) phenomenon: design configuration and innovation is therefore a process of knowledge creation rather than knowledge application - the provision of answers to consumers' questions. User knowledge is therefore central and dynamic: users will modify certain products to meet their specific needs, a process which is mostly relatively invisible. Central to the producers' information gathering procedures are their knowledge gatekeepers, informal information networks and defensive knowledge trading. These might also involve the generation of a design configuration around a new product (the involvement of an (industrial) customer) early on in the development process. Variety and lack of spontaneity in the relation between producers and users. The role of expert organisations. The need to involve marketing much earlier in the innovation process. The lack of concern among consumers for the technology itself. The main issue here is the relevance and usefulness of the shift from organisational to individual consumers - and how far the analysis with respect to the first can be applied to the second.
Information Technologies: The Relationship Between Production and Consumption: Some Theoretical Hypotheses on the Relationship Between Technological Supply and Societal Demand
Santiago Lorente
High Technical School of Telecommunication Engineering, Universidad Politécnica de Madrid
A focus on conviviality: the happy coexistence of technology and humanity and a concern with the quality of life and technology's role in creating and sustaining it. This is in turn linked to the notion of community both in its global and local manifestations. The focus on the 'global house' at the intersection of sociology, technology and architecture. The relevance of changes in the life cycle, changes in technology and changes in spatial demands to an understanding of the emergence of the 'global house'. The VCR (VTR) and the conviviality condition. The need to compare personal computers and video recorders (VCRs/ VTRs) and to explain their difference in terms of their conviviality.
Design and the Domestication of Information and Communication Technologies
Roger Silverstone and Leslie Haddon
Graduate Research Centre in Culture and Communication, University of Sussex
The design/domestication interface offers an approach to the dynamic and indeterminate processes that we call innovation by defining design as involving three steps or phases: creating the artefact; constructing the user and catching the consumer. These are related to a set of equivalent deconstructive dimensions of the domestication process which feed back into design at a number of points. The need to understand the complex interrelationships of social actors and emergent technologies, and the role of a certain kind of creativity (action/agency) at each stage of the process acknowledging that creativity is both dependent on, and in turn defines structure. Engrained in this analysis is the awareness that all technologies (both hardware and software) are commodities and that the innovation process is essentially a process of commodification, but one that is both indeterminate and incomplete. The meaning of objects, technologies, services, and communications are all dependent on the active engagement of users as well as producers. That activity is the central motor of innovation, affecting the meaning of the machine long after the point of purchase. Equally the long established and socially defined meanings of machines offer powerful constraints on the direction and success of subsequent efforts at technological innovation.